Page content is different in Preview vs Normal mode

[adamk93229702]

I've got a page where if I use the 'W' shortcut to switch to Preview and back, the content changes. Just happens to be on a retail press advertisement with pricing and discounts. SCARY.

It's confidential at the moment, so cannot share, but have a video I can share when the ad hits the newspapers.

I've got a 1 month old Macbook Pro M3 Max with 64gb RAM and an up-to-date version of Sonoma running. It cost me nearly $8,000 and the Indesign experience is hopeless. It's only marginally faster than the 2020 Intel i9 32GB machine that I upgraded and has far more bugs. The upgrade specifically to get better performance in Indesign so far has been a waste of money. Desperately hoping that future releasees of Indesign are compatible with the newest hardware.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

What content changes, and how, when you switch from Preview to Normal?

What performance limitations are you seeing with InDesign — specifically?

You should be aware — and as an existing user, should have been aware — that ID is not fully compatible with Sonoma. The recommendation is not to upgrade to Sonoma yet if ID is part of your critical workflow.

As for the rest — money spent has never been a guarantee of "performance" or capability. Based on everything you state, you could have saved either the expenditure on a new system, or such a lavish one. There are a number of performance and reliability issues with InDesign that can be solved by relatively simple reconfiguration, or removing system bottlenecks, that will not necessarily be fixed by moving to an uber platform. (And if you switched platforms with the idea that "Mac is better" for Adobe apps, well, there hasn't been a significant difference in platforms with more or less comparable specs for at least a decade, maybe longer.)

But let's start with those first two questions. While ID can have some performance issues with some complex elements, mostly long documents with complex dynamic formatting and/or cross references and/or many images with applied effects, a single page ad of almost any complexity is — in my experience — well within acceptable performance returns. So let's figure out what's wrong that doesn't have anything to do with the silicon.

[adamk93229702]

James,

1) Text boxes that contain a price, e.g. $7,099 when viewed in Normal view, change to $0,000 (as per the template I started creating the document) when viewed in Preview, triggered using the W shortcut. See before and after from movie I took of it.  I'm sure you can undestand how this could be a frightening bug when sending out press ads that are seen by millions of readers. The issue did not occur in the same file once I'd quit Indesign and restarted.

2) There are a number of performance issues. Zooming in/out using various methods is not responosive, screen redraw when using the hand to pan around the layout is laggy or glitchy, switching between open documents is slower than my old Mac, duplicating pages in the Pages palette crashes Indesign every time. I could go on.

3) The machine came with Sonoma installed. I got it in February. Sonoma was released in September 2023 – I think it's unreasonable to expect users to backdate their OS on new hardware after 5 months. I'd suggest that developer effort could be focused entirely on stable Sonoma release and the list of long-unresolved bugs, rather than niche enhancements and extenstions.

4) I'm based in Australia. We pay far more for Apple gear here, regardless of USD exchange rate. My 2020 MBP would max out of the 32GB RAM; I can't see why opting for a high spec CPU/GPU configuration to maximise the machine's lifespan would be viewed as a poor decision.  I haven't used Windows for 20 years – not sure whey you'd introduce that to this discussion.

5) I'm interested to hear what bottlenecks users need to address to get the software to run nicely on premium hardware. My documents are not complex, generally no more than 4 pages and based on templates I've been using for 10 years.

[flaming1]

I know it doesn't help, but I can sympathise with some of the problems you're having. I also upgraded to a new laptop relatively recently, with Sonoma already installed. I daily face screen redraw issues, flashing graphics when I try to select them or move them, the screen turning completely black, etc. I'm in New Zealand so also paid a lot for my Macbook Pro M2 Max late last year.

As far as your scary changing text issue goes. I assume you will be sending a PDF to the papers, so you should be OK to trust your final output PDF. Although this doesn't solve the frustrating bug you're seeing, I guess fairly regularly creating press-ready PDFs will let you know if the problem is actually affecting your file or whether it's just some weird screen redraw bug.

There have been various threads on here mentioning turning rulers off and/or switching the GPU on or off, but unfortunately none of the solutions work for me. I too would be very interested to know about any InDesign-related bottlenecks I can address to get things running smoother.

[adamk93229702]

All of the problems you list are common to me too. Other annoying regressions for me are snap-to guides not working accurately and not being able to double-click into grouped objects.

Yes, I'm confident – I think – the finished PDF files will be representative, it's more of a concern in the proofing/amendment rounds when things are done in a hurry. Sometimes I don't have time to thoroughly check the PDF and have to trust that the software isn't letting me down.

I have rulers turn off and find that has improved erratic screen redraws. I flip between GPU off and GPU on with Animated Zoom unticked. Animate Zoom, which I used daily on old machine is a disaster – taken 2 weeks to unlearn using that keyboard & mouse combination.

Hope for both our sakes that these issues get resolved. Not good enough from Adobe IMO – I pay thousands a year for my team's Creative Cloud licences.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Templates are always minefields. IME, they end up costing more time fixing problems and "trying to read the designer's mind" than they save in the first place. The problem could be something exceedingly simple, or a complicated mess caused by trying to get too convoluted and tricky with layers, styles, etc. There may be no good solution beyond having a pro look at the file; we could guess and try for days (and have, in the past) before finding out it's a locked-layer problem or a GREP Style failure or something else esoteric.

(The mindset of template designers often baffles me; they use approaches I would probably fire someone over on a second occurrence.)

Okay, AUS$ explains some of that shocking price, but I'll boil down a lot of side arguments to this: InDesign is still a single-core app, so inflating CPU system power past the modest does not (right now or for the foreseeable future) add performance. Adequate RAM and decent GPU power do... and you may want to turn off GPU acceleration, as it seems to cause more problems on Macs than it boosts performance. In short, ID works very well on relatively modest hardware (muscular but not extreme) as long as there's adequate RAM and no file/networking bottlenecks.

AFAIK, most of the performance issues you note are related to the Sonoma incompatibilities. If you can't roll back to the last version on a new system, you may have to live with the issues until Adobe and Apple work out the problems. (It's been some time, so I gather the problems are not trivial.)

[adamk93229702]

The templates I'm referring to are ones I've built and refined myself, .indt files that I use as clean starting points to layout 40+ retail press advertisements per week, not purchased templates. I've been using since 2015 without issue, until changing over to new machine.

To your point about machine specs, check this link for how you can configure the 16" model https://www.apple.com/au/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch

There are a limited number of combinations of RAM/CPU/GPU specifications – you can't get a powerful GPU without a powerful CPU. For starters, choosing 16" over 14" screen size automatically bumps you up to the M3Pro chip. Certain RAM sizes are only available with certain CPU/GPU pairings, etc. 

My team all work off our built-in HDs, which are then synced to Dropbox for remote sharing – no NAS servers or networking weakpoints to my knowledge.

They are on either M1 or M2 chip machines with similar core specifications to mine, but all on Ventura and while not perfect by any stretch, don't have anywhere near the number of issues I'm having.

I appreciate your perspective that I've overspecfified my machine, though I do some video work too. However, regardless of the cost, I have some of the best hardware available and this software runs poorly on it. I can only presume that Adobe had partner/beta releases of Sonoma for some time prior to general release in Sept 2023 – it was showcased in June 2023. How long do they need to build a compatible release, while I keep paying thousands per year for my team's licences?

Personally hoping that a new contender comes on the market – Figma for print maybe – that knocks ID off its perch, like it did to Quark Xpress when it became outdated.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay. "I'm having weird issues with a template" almost always means "....that I downloaded from Adobe or somewhere." Apply above comments to those.

There's nothing wrong with buying/building a future-powered system, if your budget and expected life-of-use permit. And other apps do make use of that added muscle.

I'll just sum up that most of us — experienced to 'expert' — seem to use fairly modest builds with InDesign, often do very complex work and rarely see the performance issues reported by other users. And repeat that there's next to no difference between macOS and Windows platforms any more — for pretty much any apps, and certainly not Adobe. (A few UI issues seems to be about it.) And if, as an experienced user, you'd checked in beforehand, you'd have learned that you had no compelling reason to switch to a Mac, and that all the 2024+ power in the world won't change ID's fundamental one-core limitation.

If you think Figma or Canva will ever reach ID's level of publication power, you're welcome to wait for those miracles. At some point, these largely amateur-focused, template-based, online-doc (and quick print) tools may become the basic workbench for that subset of work, but I have a ca. 1965 story about box Brownies being just as good as Leicas, too.

And other than your specific glitches with this legacy document — and you should be well aware that frequently edited and reused docs can get corrupted, in many apps — you haven't said what the performance problems were that led you to switching to a different and beefed-up platform. As I've noted, most such perceptions can be fixed with minor changes to the setup, and there is certainly no broad or wholesale case of ID being slow, glitchy and underperforming for some very large part of the professional user base.

[adamk93229702]

My old machine was a 2020 Macbook Pro with an Intel chip i9 chip, not Windows. It was constantly running out of ram at 32GB and the fan was constantly running as it often got up to 80ºC (180F). My business also changes over hardware for financial/tax reasons.

Other designers in my studio have M1 and M2 Macbook Pros with maxed out CPU/GPU & 64gb RAM and, other than the known issues like the screen explosions, they run ID much faster than my old 2020 MBP, and sadly more reliably than my new M3. They are on Ventura and wont' be updaing to Sonoma.

Your commentary using Figma and Canva in the same sentence is interesting. Figma is anything but amateur-focused and in the space of a few years blown away Photoshop and Sketch (and XD) as the industry standard for UI design. It produces a different finished product, but as a design application experience, it leaves Indesign for dead. Third party developers are already creating CMYK plugins for it. An 'it'll never happen mentality' is probably how Quark Xpress went from industry standard to dead in a matter of years. It might not be Figma itself, but ID feels like old, bloated software these days and is ripe for being knocked off by a more modern application – one that doesn't have a fundamental one-core limitation, maybe?

I'm keen to hear what you think I'm doing wrong with my setup other than having and OS that's 6 months old and expecting ID to run on it? I've loaded 4 typefaces outside of what comes with the OS. I'm working off the inbuilt SSD. Other designers in my studio are all using the same .indt files that I'm using without any major issues.

Bottom line here is that if Sonoma is the lone source of my issues – and anybody else who's bought a new Mac in the last 6 months – Adobe need's to prioritise building a release that works on this OS. They've had long enough.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@adamk93229702 

I'm not Mac user - but I'm pretty sure you should be able to downgrade your OS to Ventura - even on a new machine - unless Apple is blocking users in this department as well...

First link from Google:

https://medium.com/the-web-developers-vuepoint/why-it-took-me-16-hours-to-downgrade-my-macbook-from-...

https://www.google.com/search?q=new+macbook+pro+downgrade+to+ventura

[rob day]

Hi @adamk93229702 , Check to make sure all of your Layers are set to print—in Preview mode a Layer with its Layer Options set with Print Layer unchecked would be hidden:

Normal Mode

Preview mode

[adamk93229702]

Hi Rob, thanks for the tip – checked and the layer is set to print. This bug resolved itself in the file after I quit Indesign and restarted. Not sure if it's how Preview mode works, but wondering if the preview is cached as changes are made to the file and the cached view was out of sync?

[rob day]

UI problems can be Cache related—usually you see it in the panels.

Clearing your Caches folder is a relatively painless troubleshooting step–on MacOS its delete this folder ~username ▸ ⁨Library⁩ ▸ ⁨Caches⁩ ▸ ⁨Adobe InDesign⁩ ▸ ⁨Version X.0⁩

[leo.r]

> an up-to-date version of Sonoma running

I just have to ask: what's the exact version of your macOS? Sometimes "up-to-date version" turns out to not to be such. macOS 14.3 solved the display issues you describe for most users (although some users do report that it didn't make any difference).

[adamk93229702]

I have 14.3.1, which at the time of the OP, was the latest (in Australia, we don't get software releases at the same time as US). I can now see that 14.4 is available but I will wait until the weekend to upgrade in case it causes new issues. An update to 19.3 was released here and I updated it yesterday. The laggy responses to switching documents, panning around the screen, zoom in/out still remain, but I've been able to duplicate pages in the Pages palette without crashing Indesign, so that must have been a known bug fixed in the 19.3. Baby steps.

[adamk93229702]

Sadly not, Indesign crashing again on Duplicate Spread via any method. This time, (3rd time it's happened) crashes the whole system. I've deleted preferences, caches, updated Sonoma to 14.4, Indesign to 19.3. No joy.

[redbook12]

I have the same thing happening (today and yesterday), and saw a post about this 4 years ago as well.

Switching between the preview and normal screen setting yields text flowing differently. Of course I don't think it really is different, just that the "preview mode" has not caught up with reality. When I close the document a reopen, it resolves (I ididn't have to quit Indesign to get it looking right). I switch between the two views using a custom keyboard shortcut, but next time will try the menu dropdown. I can't reproduce it now since I resolved it. BUT I would almost put money on it happening again! I'm using an older CC version (2019) but have noticed that some bugs have ridden right along with all of the updates right back CS 4.0!

[redbook12]

P.S. I'm running WINDOWS X on a PC, so this issue is not just on Macs.